


saturday nights (sunday mornings)

by myvoidedeyes



Category: Batman (Comics), DCU, DCU (Comics), Red Hood and the Outlaws (Comics)
Genre: Aging, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Ass-Kicking, Blood, Blood and Gore, Boys Kissing, Character Study, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Implied Relationships, Implied Sexual Content, Jason Todd-centric, Jaytim - Freeform, Kissing, M/M, Major Character Undeath, Mild Blood, Past Character Death, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Times of Day, Vigilantism, Violence, and its impacts, because im a bad person who, because its jason, just a little, no beta we die like men, spoiler - Freeform, technically, there are a lot - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-24
Updated: 2019-02-24
Packaged: 2019-11-04 16:47:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17901821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myvoidedeyes/pseuds/myvoidedeyes
Summary: like the hands on a clock, jason's feelings change throughout the day





	saturday nights (sunday mornings)

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not entirely sure what this is or where it came from. I just tend to listen to a song and word-vomit up whatever comes to mind, and today it was Jason and the song was "The Saddest Song" by Alec Benjamin because I'm in the mood for sad music and sad boys apparently.

Sunrise was a beautiful, if morbid, marker of time’s passage. Hues of oranges, yellows, and purples—like cosmic bruises, not unlike his own, across the skyline—obscured by a net of heavy smog and ever-present clouds, high as he had made the horizon.

He didn’t often see the morning sky; even less often was he awake for both sunset and sunrise consecutively. Or conscious of the latter’s passing when he was. Though it was better when he didn’t. After all, it was none too rarely that those swirling colours made his mouth taste of stale air, metal, and _red_.

 

(Red like the emblem on his chest and the scabs on his knuckles. Red like the suit he had once worn and the numbers that had _tick-tick-tick_ ed down to zero)

 

Maybe there was something to be said about how he could still remember his last sunrise, remember the hope and anger and fear grown around his ribs as it had come. Or his first, _after_ , where those ribs had been broken like so much else and all he could feel was pain.

Maybe he just didn’t like the reminder than every sunrise could be his last. Again.

 

———

 

Twilight came with promise.

As the sun hovered just below the horizon—out of sight but still turning the sky a slew of watery, last-minute pastels—and the shadows began to hover around the mouths of alleyways and sharp, dangerous corners—waiting with infinite patience to pounce—the filthy air would begin to vibrate and seethe with pent-up energy. It would come to sit in the marrow of his bones, nipping at his nerves with growing restlessness in a way he had long learned to ignore, but rarely chose to.

Dying light and desperate darkness: those were the harbingers of twilight’s twisting promise.

And that promise—that promise sounded like a heart pounding; like lungs burning; like air splitting around him. Tasted like adrenaline highs and the sweet relief of the ache going out of his body and all his un-broken bones. Felt like blood on his fists and knives; like the kickback of guns in his hands; like bruises and new-old breaks.

Twilight promised violence with a silver tongue and a tone that beckoned.

 

———

 

Midnight was a kind of dark-light that could only be found over a city so thick with light pollution and smog that even night was never truly dark.

Under the blue-grey of the sky, leaping across roofs and into fights: that was where he felt most at home.

Part of it came from the way he could wear a mask and spill his anger out around him in blood and the wet shattering of a body hit too hard, too much. Came from how he could _feel_ things change bit by bit with every blow and clattering shell casing. With every drug dealer and weapons peddler and human trafficker that he disappeared off the streets.

The other half, though he’d never admit it, came from the occasional flash of red and black overhead, and the whistling of artificial wings. Came from a sarcastic, irate voice crackling in his ear and a sense of long-suffering exasperation tinted with affection they would eventually have to confront.

 

(And, perhaps also from the sporadic, frantic press of bodies against brick walls and rooftop doorways, a rough clash of lips and teeth—something that would never be spoken of; that he _could not_ _face_ in anything but darkness.)

 

Midnight had once been accompanied by a pulsating, unquenchable rage that would hound him through the city, howling for a certain kind of blood and demanding he spill it. Now just assured him he was making the right choice, while at the same time making him question his sanity.

 

———

 

Afternoon was something he slept into less and less.

Late nights, as he had found out many, many years prior, did not lend themselves well to early mornings. As he got older, however, his body seemed to disagree.

It disagreed in the pointed way his old pains became more pronounced and in how often he had begun to wake up well before noon.

The first, second, fifty-third times had caught him so absurdly off guard. Even after he had come back, had filled his nails with splinters and dirt as he broke into the world once more, he had never expected to live long enough to get _old_. None of them did.

How could they do what they did—break both themselves and others—and even consider that they might live long enough for their bodies to well and truly begin to revolt against their activities? How could _he_ after so directly facing down his own mortality?

And yet, there he was, waking to a clock that boasted numbers still in the single digits and unable to fall back asleep. Everything from to his eyes to his limbs would feel _heavy_ as he went through the motions to boil the water, steep the tea every morning.

He had begun to feel tired in a way that went beyond sleep. It was almost as if his body was in revolt, trying to tell him enough was enough.

Problem was, he didn’t think he _could_ stop. The blood and the mask and the streets were too much a part of him to let go of.

But that didn’t stop him from wanting more. From wanting something he knew and had known he could never have.

Afternoons were the hardest to get through.

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, still not sure what this is.  
> Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this runaway-train of a fic and—still feel weird about this—if you did, consider leaving kudos or a comment to validate my prose-y ramblings.


End file.
